Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Explaining America's Dimwitted President

Business-oriented persons are interested in getting things done, and in solving problems in order to accomplish that. Ideological persons are more interested in posturing and in establishing their good intentions and their authority to do what is best for everyone else. The Chinese of the 21st century fall more into the category of problem-solvers and business-oriented. That is perhaps why it is so hard to explain President Obama to the Chinese.

Ideological environmentalism has trumped economic development and has thwarted economic freedom, which was, ostensibly, the motive of the Cold War. Al Gore, before the Tipper French Kiss and before the Nobel Prize for the “Inconvenient Truth” wrote that the “internal combustion engine is the biggest threat to humankind.”

Tell that to the Chinese who are buying more than 40,000 new cars per day.

Make no mistake: global climate change rhetoric -- fully espoused by the Obama Administration -- is a frontal attack on the US and the lifestyle that emanates from its economy and system. The Europeans who adopted it in the first place are not averse to admit that they are jealous of America. The Chinese, who are all too aware of the ramifications of mandatory carbon restrictions on both the world and, in particular, their economy, simply will not play along. They are, at best, bemused. “We believe your science” they will say, saving themselves from entering the rat’s nest of climate science and its implications. But “you do the right thing. Reduce your carbon footprint. We will be applauding while we develop to your level.”

Meanwhile, we have an administration that came to power touting alternatives like solar and wind and the negative-energy-balance biofuels, which everybody, with any common sense, knows that they will never account for more than a couple of percentage points of the world energy mix. Without government subsidies they will be even less.

I had a hope that a president, any president, would level with the American people and explain for the first time that, for decades to come, there are no alternatives to oil, gas and coal. But then there was the BP disaster, providing almost gleeful fodder to the Obama Administration and its allies to reinforce their pre-ordained belief that oil is bad.

None of this prevents the Chinese from spanning the globe for oil and gas, while Americans are watching in a naïve stupor.

In just the last six months, Chinese oil giant Sinopec paid ConocoPhillips $4.65 billion to acquire its share in a Canadian tar sands project. That followed the company’s $2.46 billion acquisition of Angola’s deep-water oil reserves, a $7.56 billion acquisition of Swiss-based Addax Petroleum. CNOOC, China’s third-largest oil company, paid $6 billion to acquire the Brazilian Peregrino field. PetroChina gave Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez a $20 billion loan to be repaid by oil and that was in addition to the company’s announcement it will spend at least $60 billion over the next 10 years to acquire more oil and gas assets abroad.

The Chinese are actually bewildered. After a few drinks and when words become looser and in some ways, more lucid, they have one question. “Why are you letting us do it with no resistance and no competition?" They understand that energy means power and better economics. We no longer seem to get it. _EnergyTribune

Well, some of us get it, although the Obama Pelosi regime does not. But as long as Obama Pelosi is making the rules and steering the ship, America remains in deadly hazard from its dimwitted leadership, which observes the world through an ideological blindfold, and voluntarily wears a straitjacket of political correctness.